Time Machine Frequent "Start New Backup"

@Pondini

Something that is working correctly mos of the time and fail for some users, repetitively, on supported configuration is not something that is working, it's buggy, and it's waiting to loose your backup and your file revision. It's just buggy! Worse it corrupt silently your backup, when it warn you, it's already too late!

Direct connection is fastest and safest. But I BOUGHT a TimeCapsule to have a transparent 24/7 backup available, that we don't have to care of, not to use this $300 box as a Wifi Router and needing to connect USB hard-drive repetitively to our laptops!

Have you ruled out power and/or network interference problems? That's not easy to do -- power problems can be intermittent and you may not even notice the lights dimming. Similarly, if you're in an area with a lot of networks (some hidden), cordless phones, microwave ovens, etc., the problems can come and go.

One of the networking gurus posting in the Time Capsule forum a while ago reported that he'd finally found the problem that caused his whole network to crash on very rare occasions -- he happend to see his neighbor across the street coming out his front door talking on a cordless phone and BAM, down went the network! When he went back inside, the network recovered.

@Pondini,

No I have not ruled out anything. Infact, I dont have to. Its NOT me who should worry about this, the user should not have to care. It should just work, completely hidden for the user. If a backup fails, discard it and start over again when possible. The complete backup history should NOT be trashed, thats not good backup software. And I have used TM since it came out with Leopard 2008, and I have not experienced it once before I upgraded to Lion. Dont you agree to this? Isnt apple about the user experience? This is not good enough, far from it.

Yes, you're right. Everything should work at all times, under all cirumstances.

Until that day arrives, hardware will break, software will have bugs, networks will have interference, etc. Sorry.

When something does go wrong, there may or may not be an immediate solution. You can try to find one, or not. That's your choice.

Be sure to tell Apple all about it: http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

iAPX wrote:

Like @aldabergr put it rightly, this is *NOT* a third party issue, this is an Apple issue.

The evidence that TimeMachine doesn't work correctly with a TimeCapsule show that it's clearly a bug in the TimeMachine software, or the proprietary Apple protocol extension for TimeMachine over Wi-Fi (and networks in general), as it doesn't happens on USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt hard drives.

It happened on my 10.8.x MBP as well as on a 10.7.x MBA, both backuped on the same TimeCapsule. It's just unreliable!

Since you seem to be on a fully supported system, can you please call Apple and report your problem? Thanks!

My NAS is powered by a UPS so I suspect power is OK. I have no simple means to diagnose network issues. I am wired, rather than wireless, to the NAS, so that should reduce some possible network interference sources such as microwaves etc.

I re-created a new backup with powersaving dissabled. I see several people recommend this. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

qazxsw143 wrote:

My NAS is powered by a UPS so I suspect power is OK.

Ah, good.

I am wired, rather than wireless, to the NAS, so that should reduce some possible network interference sources such as microwaves etc.

Yes, greatly. If all else fails, one long shot you might try is to remove or power-off anything else on the network you can. I've seen reports where a misbehaving printer on a wired network was flooding it with spurious messages, causing all sorts of bizarre behavior elsewhere.

I'm also having this issue - Worked perfectly under Snow Leopard -> Upgraded to Lion then Mountain Lion and now every 2-3 days I have to make a new backup. Backing up to WD Mybook Live 3TB seems to be the issue. I'm also backing up to a WD USB connection so I'll see how that goes

I had the same problem. Not sure why because I'd previously used my TimeCapsule and TimeMachine to backup my iMac daily, every day since 2009. Then out of the blue, I get the "to improve reliability... create a new backup" error.

Like others here, I must chime in with my positive experience using the guidance on this site:

http://www.garth.org/archives/2011,08,27,169,fix-time-machine-sparsebundle-nas-b ased-backup-errors.html

It didn't work for me initially, mainly because I am a novice when it comes to the Terminal, and Garth's advice on that page is not detailed enough for those of us who are ignorant about Terminal messages. But I wrote to Garth and finally got it to work. Nevertheless, I still sent Feedback to Apple because Apple really should enable Disk Utility to Verify and Repair TimeCapsule sparsebundles. Indeed, rather than presenting us with a single "make new backup" option when corruption is found, that dialog should offer us the means to "Use Disk Utility to Repair." I wrote Apple to that effect, and I would encourage everyone else in this discussion to do that same:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/timecapsule.html

Should the problem ever arise again, I honestly don't want to use the Terminal to fix it. I'd much rather use Disk Utility.

In the meantime, those of you tinkering with the Terminal might find this useful:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages /man8/fsck_hfs.8.html

Hi All,

I have reinstalled ML on my mac and reset my synology DS212j to try to combat this issue. I've specified the user to connect to my NAS as 'admin', rather than a specified user with an assigned a space quota.

So far, I've done manual backups every day and followed them up by verifying it and have had no problems.

Prior to doing this, i was using an external USB3 for a good month before i could spare the time to re-install everything and had no problems whatsoever. That is a lot longer than the time it usually took to give me the corrupted backup error (approx 1week)

I'll make sure to post frequently with the status.

Austin

I use a ReadyNAS Ultra 4, a MacBook Pro Retina 15 inch with OS X 10.7.4, and I am getting this same issue. I'm about to leave on a business trip, and the **** thing just told me again that it needs to do a new backup, but I just did one 5 days ago. It took 12 hours. If I lose what's on the machine, I don't have any other backup of it.

Apple, are you reading your own forums? This is a mission critical bug! I will be forced to spend hundreds on another propietary backup solution or lose all of my data, are you prepared to pay my bill?

Now is probably the time to remind everyone that reads this thread that filing a bug report at the following link is a good idea as apple apparently don't read the forums.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Make sure you include a link to this thread.

Austin

CelloG wrote:

. . .

Apple, are you reading your own forums?

No, they do not routinely review these forums for technical problems.

Ordinarily, if you don't find a solution here, you can get some help from AppleCare, or (eventually) the Bug Reporter facility, but with 3rd-party software & hardware involved, Apple will point to them, and they'll point to Apple.

I will be forced to spend hundreds on another propietary backup solution

I understand your irritation, but that's a bit exaggeraged. CarbonCopyCloner is $40 (with a 30-day free trial), SuperDuper about $27 (with a free version that only does full backups) as I recall.

And it's always wise to keep at least two sets of backups, on different hardware, and with two different apps. All hardware fails, sooner or later; no backup app is perfect; and the best of us have mistakenly erased the wrong drive or partition.

As usual, I will beg to differ with those who literally live 24/7 in these forums and acrue 35k points to their name. Apple DOES in fact READ these forums WHEN WE LINK TO THEM IN BUG REPORTS. So your words here are not wasted, Cello. I file bug reports and link to the forums. As such, your words serve as a powerful tool when combined with hundreds of other voices bearing the same woes. So never be deterred from posting here or posting "all your thoughts and heartache." Forum veterans (the one's with mega points to their names anyway) dislike it tremendously and brow-beat us accordingly. But "posting your mind" the right thing to do. I do appreciate some of the thoughtful alternatives these Forum Vets kick out to us at times; but let's face it, those of us posting in this thread mostly want a solution for what we have now, rather than go with CCC or SuperDuper. Although two backups are better than one in theory, one good backup is better than none.

I must say that Austin is correct about filing bug reports. But in my experience (both with "Feedback" reports and with "ADC RadarWeb Bug Reports"), I find that such is usually just a teensy tiny prod. ADC almost always sends me a reply a day late to say that the bug I've reported is a known issue. Apple does whatever it wants, in its own time — unless perhaps the media picks up on a story and posts it all over the web. Only then does it seem that Apple lifts a finger to address the issue (more for the sake of improving PR, rather than "100% customer satisfaction" or "making great stuff.") Nevertheless, you should submit feedback and bug reports regularly, if not but to just "bug Apple" about it.

Sorry to be so scornful and Jaded. But having been an Apple fan since my 128k in 1984, I've got no hang-ups about praising Apple when praise is due and casting a stone of criticism at them when they deserve it. And they certainly do deserve more than one stone for foolishly not providing users with a convenient and easy means of repairing Time Machine Backup defects via Disk Utility in light of how many years Time Machine has been out there. In my mind, that's as much a fiasco as MobileMe ever was. Perhaps Apple should hire me as a Steve Jobs replacement for Deadbeat Employee Fanny Kicker. Updating Disk Utility should take Apple's enormous OS X engineering team all of a week to get it coded and another couple weeks for debugging. Apple has no excuses on this.

Keep the torch burning brightly.

JDW1 wrote:

As usual, I will beg to differ with those who literally live 24/7 in these forums and acrue 35k points to their name. Apple DOES in fact READ these forums WHEN WE LINK TO THEM IN BUG REPORTS.

Yes, of course.

As I said, Apple doesn't routinely read these forums for technical problems. That's very different.

And as I also said, ordinarily you can get some help from AppleCare or the BugReporter site (although it often takes a very long time to get a response -- I got one a few months ago from a 2-year old BR).

I am certainly not saying don't file BRs -- I do that routinely, and encourage it when a solution isn't already known. There's even a page on my web site for it: Reporting a Problem to Apple. But it shouldn't be the first thing to do.

What I am saying, though, is when there's 3rd-party hardware and/or software involved, it's very difficult to get results. You won't get any from AppleCare directly, as they don't have any of the hardware and little or no knowledge of the 3rd-party products. But they can refer things to the engineers, and you may get an answer (I got a very complete one a few years ago regarding an issue with U.P.S. systems, but it took a couple of months).

The difficulty with this issue is, there seem to be several causes, and lots of different hardware involved. Most of the ones I've seen with Apple hardware (Time Capsules) have turned out to be power or WIFI problems, or the TC beginning to fail. So those are the first things I recommend folks check in #C13 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting. And as noted there, if you're having this issue with a NAS, also report it to the maker. The Time Machine Server Requirements are fairly complex -- if the NAS isn't handling them properly, problems are certainly possible.